I have no idea how to create pages but I'll figure it out eventually godammit

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

I have so many posts I need to write, yet I am wasting my precious free time MSPainting masterpieces like this instead.

In other news, Jeff Francoeur got traded to Texas. I am somewhat happy about this because I still have a soft spot for the knucklehead, and I'm going to the game tomorrow, and I would have booed his ass lustily. Most everyone out there giving me a Look of Disapproval right now would likely also boo a Met if given half a chance so cut it out. The drawback to seeing Frenchy out of that nasty uniform is that there is a chance Atlanta could meet up with the Rangers in the World Series and Jeff Francoeur only lives up to his vast potential when playing the Braves. So there's one more thing to keep me up at nights. Good luck Frenchy, go earn yourself a contract next year out in Texas.

As long as I had MSPaint fired up, I decided to cobble this together in honor of Luis Castillo's defensive prowess this evening. (yes, I know it sucks - that's five whole minutes of work there)

Unexpected packages usually mean only one thing - BIPPAGE. But this was too thin for a proper Bip. What could it be?

BLAM!

I've just been Old Schooled? What ever does this mean?

1971 Topps J-Hey

That's what it means!

A card celebrating Jason Heyward's home run on his 21st birthday! This kicks eTopps' ass from here to Sunday. If you shall note - The Braves have since doubled their lead against the Phillies since that day in no small part to Heyward's heroics including another three run Bomb last night. Thanks Topher! Go and check out Crackin' Wax for more neat schtuff like this!

Monday, August 30, 2010

Wooooo! Football season is here! More or less, anyway. College is about to start up and the NFL will be kicking off soon enough. I got a fantasy draft in an hour and a half so that counts. I've gotten apathetic towards most football products but I still like the Topps flagship. I picked up a few packs out of habit, here's a rundown of what you will find.

First 2010 Topps Football card:

Early Doucet of the Cards. If I had opened the bottom half of the rack pack my first card would have been Matthew Stafford. Oh well. As you can see it's a direct copy of the baseball design. It looks good enough on football I suppose but I miss the days where Topps gave every set a unique design, no matter how horrible the design turned out to be. The only weird thing is the team logo in the bottom left corner. Like on the baseball set, the logo is large to the point of gaudy, but some of the logos incorporate the city or state name as well which looks odd. Shuffling through the cards I got it looks like if the team existed in its current city in the early '80s, then there's no city name, otherwise the city or state is included. Cincinnati Bengals blows my theory, but it works for most all other teams.

Here's the back of a card:

Same back as baseball, this one of Ricky Williams' up and down and back up again career was interesting enough to scan.

There's a few subsets at the end of the set including this All-Pro subset:

That is a weird looking uniform for the Jets, but I love the old-school Oilers helmet on the right. When I first saw the All-Pro logo I hoped it was on the base card like back in the old days, but nope, it was a subset.

The team cards look kickass.

Here's a rookie card:

The rookie logo is 3D tilted for coolness effect but not overly large. The packs all claim "A rookie in every pack!!!". I found 6 in the rack and anywhere from 1 to 4 rookies in the normal packs.You will have rookies. Rookie cards also seem to be the only place you'll find an Offensive Tackle in the set, though I could be wrong.

This is kinda neat, they used the 2010 Rookie Premeire poster shot as a checklist card. I would always pick one of these posters up from the local card shop and it would get trashed before I thought about hanging it up.

Ok time for the inserts. We'll transition into it with an insert that is a base card from another set.

Here's an Attax Towncard of Tom Brady. Take my code, please. After looking though some Panini Adrenalyn cards, I think I like their game better. These waste one card per pack.

Now for the Proper inserts, at least the ones I pulled.

Peak Performance cards are back and they are not as dreadfully boring as the ones in the baseball set.

This one is particularly interesting as it is a card of Jonathan Dwyer, celebrating his run in the ACC championship game for Georgia Tech, while wearing a Steelers uniform that was either photoshopped or taken at the Rookie Premiere day.

The Peak performance cards also come in relic flavor.

If these photos of the rookies were actually taken at Rookie Premiere day, then the swatch on the card came from the jersey in the photo which is kinda neat. I would pull a Panther though....

Rookies have TONS of inserts all over this set. Here's another one:

This is a throwback to the 1952 Bowman set. The Chiefs didn't exist in 1952, and neither did cards with dudes wearing dreads. It's a pretty nice looking set as far as Retro goes, and there is also a greyback parallel of this set that is some ridiculous odds like 1:50 Wal-Marts apparently. I didn't get one so I don't know how it looks.

Topps double-Bowmaned their set with this retail only insert:

Here's a sneak peek of the 2010 Bowman set, these are 1:4? packs in Wally World and Target loosey packs. I was lucky enough to get one of this dude on the Broncos. Better than that other dude on the Broncos, I guess. You know, Pigskin Strasburg..

Veterans and rookies are all over the insert sets, this one is a little of both.

For the 75th anniversary of the NFL Draft Topps has this rather nice looking insert of some of the best draft picks. It's a welcome change from the retros and the holdover inserts from baseball, that's for sure. I got Dan the Man, which appears to be a theme in my packs.

Here's another boring-ass baseball holdover insert set. Blech.

Gridiron Lineage. A Patriot and a Cowboy on the same card. Whoop-de-damn-do. Like in Baseball, I shall collect any of these with an Atlanta player on it and shun the rest.

These aren't cards Yo Momma threw out...

They're just reprints. You probably threw out your old football cards yourself anyway. Here's another Dan Marino. I love reprints so I'll be keeping this one. The picture quality on the front is atrocious. It looks like they scanned it at about 96 DPI.

Here's the back:

Other than the card stock and copyright date, there's no indication that this is a reprint. Expect to see shady eBay sellers hawking these off as originals. Also expect idiots to buy them. Sigh.

There's also Transmogrifier cards out there too.

Yep, another Marino. Now let me show you all the Falcon cards I got!

EL ZIPPO. One rack, 5 hobby and three retail packs and not one %#@! Falcon. Typical.

Stats on the Back sent me this card quite a while ago. I need to send something his way, but I'm having problems finding the stuff he needs. I wanted to show off this card because in 1982, the Fleer proofreaders were all hitting the weed rather heavily and there were errors galore. Yeah, I know, there were errors all over the 1981 set too, but that year they were on coke to get the set out as quickly as possible. Here's the card:

There are three different versions of this card: all with back variations.

1) The name is misspelled All Hrabosky on the back and poor All is shrunk to 5' 1"

2) The name is correct, but Al is still short

3) everything is correct!

The All version is very scarce, and the short version is harder to get than the correct version.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

need players to fill out their leagues. Both have 9 in them now which means we can't draft until we get an even number of teams so go click on those links and beg for an invite.

I will be sending the winner of both leagues one of those small flat rate priority boxes full of football cards to get them the hell out of my house as a prize.

B.A. Benny needs one more player too, but I just signed up for Canuck's and Adam's leagues and I can't take on a third.No box of cards for that league, but Benny linked to another contest at No One's Going To Read This Blog so click and you might yet win some swag.

Strasburg is done until about 2012 recovering from Tommy John surgery to fix his busted UCL. No biggie, happens all the time. Tim Hudson came back form it, Kris Medlen will come back from it and Strasburg will do so as well. Some people saw this coming, due to his inverted W delivery. After watching Medlen go down earlier this year, my schadenfreude at watching The Savior go down was greatly diminished. I'd rather see Strasburg out there pitching so the Braves can beat up on him. To get Steven back on track, here's some alternate deliveries he can try, courtesy of Japanese baseball video game 98Koshien.

Now that would bring some real excitement to Strasburg's starts! Topps should resurrect Sportsflics in anticipation...

The URL listed on the card immediately resolves to http://football.toppscards.com/ but that's an issue for the Topps marketers and web admins to sort out. We collectors get to the same place either way. The page is set up exactly like the Baseball Transmogrifier so if you've redeemed codes there, you'll have no problem. Your baseball login works here so there's no registering twice.

Ha! Ha! You thieves just tried to steal me code, but it has already been redeemed! Wanna see what I got? You have no choice! I'm showing it anyway!

'88 Ozzie! Sure, it's from the junkwax era, but 1988 had a nice looking design and you can't go wrong with Ozzie Newsome. I am happy with my first redemption. That doesn't mean I won't try to flip the thing.

This is the first time I've tried a trade since Topps boosted the search function. Player name is still there obviously, but they've upped the Year search to a range instead of a single year. You can also now search by team and position. Team search works well, and there are also a few WLAF teams sprinkled in there from a subset in 2000 Topps. Unless you are searching for a quarterback don't bother with the position search. A search for Linebacker netted about 6 cards, none of which were Jessie Tuggle. To find him, you need to use Middle Linebacker. Just search by team or name unless you really want to collect every single Defensive Half Back card Topps ever put out. US Senator is also listed as a position for some reason. Tackling dummies, maybe? Dummies at any rate.

I really wanted to trade Ozzie for a 1990 Jessie Tuggle rookie, but none were to be found. This is probably going to end up like my Baseball Transmogrifier 1989 Mark Lemke debacle. I have literally offered up every single card in my online collection for that damn card, but there is only one out there and the guy who has it probably hasn't logged on since March. I wanted to make a trade offer for something so I chose another 1990 rookie:

Prime Time! Let's see how fast this gets rejected. Maybe a Browns fan picked up Deion. If you want to throw offers my way for Ozzie feel free, I'll try to check my trades daily so I can REJECT them utterly. Gotta have mah Deion.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

We've all been going through a bit of withdrawal this year now that Upper Deck has been smacked down and out of the baseball card business. I've personally been nursing my grudge that 2010 Goudey got kiboshed all year long. However, I didn't do anything about it besides sulk. Beardy took action!

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Stop that Redleg! He just stole the top quarter of the card! Hurry! He's escaping the scene of the crime! Poor Frank looks distraught that his name is now Fr, pitc for the Redlegs.

Ah Redlegs. The Freedom Fries of the Fifties. At least Frank Thomas Smith has his full name safely stored on the back of the card. I have no idea what took the massive chunk out of this card, but if I had to guess it was one of those staple remover things. Some kid took one of those, pretended it was a piranha and went CHOMP right on Frank's card. The kid obviously cared about the card through, because he didn't harm the picture, the logo or most importantly, the number on the back. Poor Frank is still left in the aftermath to eternally ask the question "WHY???"

Allrighty, let's finish this. As you can see I got Medlen in the box. Did I get the Hanson? Read on through this post full of drivel and find out! Or just cheat and scroll down and look at the pretty pictures. Miss my drivel, see if I care.

There must be some kind of disease infecting the Turner Field outfield that is a career-ruiner. Frenchy, McLouth and Schafer all came down with a terminal case. Someone move J-Hey to second base, quick!

WRONG YOUNG STAR PITCHER! Making this twice as painful is that I got an extra SP in the box and it was fantasy bust Aaron Hill. Oh sadness. I've mentioned it before but the cap on Mat's head just does not look right at all. I get that the flat bill on a cap is all the fashion among the cool kids (just see Kris Medlen up top) But this... this just doesn't look normal. If I didn't know better, I would swear it's a bad 70's airbrush job.

That's the box, I'll do a wrap up of both boxes and try to post the winner of the SAT contest tonight. Maybe.

Dayf the Blogger has a Posse

My original crappy neglected blog what I'm trying to resurrect this year

Note on the Blogroll

If you have a blog, and it ain't on here, LET ME KNOW! There are a lot of good blogs I'm missing out on. I'm also very forgetful and sometimes forget to put it on the list even if I do find a good one. If your blog is about cards or trading or sports in general I'll fit it in, but don't try to sneak your blog about politics or cats or crop rotation in the 14th century on here.